chapter three
After I unpacked, I went straight down to the pool, where I knew the boys would be. They were lying around on the deck chairs, their dirty bare feet hanging off the edges.
As soon as Jeremiah saw me, he sprang up. “Ladies and Gentlemen-men-men,” he began dramatically, bowing like a circus ringmaster. “I do believe it is time … for our first belly flop of the summer.”
I inched away from them uneasily. Too fast a movement, and it would be all over—they’d chase me then. “No way,” I said.
Then Conrad and Steven stood up, circling me. “You can’t fight tradition,” Steven said. Conrad just grinned evilly.
“I’m too old for this,” I said desperately. I walked backward, and that’s when they grabbed me. Steven and Jeremiah each took a wrist.
“Come on, guys,” I said, trying to wriggle out of their grasp. I dragged my feet, but they pulled me along. I knew it was futile to resist, but I always tried, even though the bottoms of my feet got burned along the pavement in the process.
“Ready?” Jeremiah said, lifting me up under my armpits.
Conrad grabbed my feet, and then Steven took my right arm while Jeremiah hung on to my left. They swung me back and forth like I was a sack of flour. “I hate you guys,” I yelled over their laughter.
“One,” Jeremiah began.
“Two,” Steven said.
“And three,” Conrad finished. Then they launched me into the pool, clothes and all. I hit the water with a loud smack. Underwater, I could hear them busting up.
The Belly Flop was something they’d started about a million summers ago. Probably it had been Steven. I hated it. Even though it was one of the only times I was included in their fun, I hated being the brunt of it. It made me feel utterly powerless, and it was a reminder that I was an outsider, too weak to fight them, all because I was a girl. Somebody’s little sister.
I used to cry about it, run to Susannah and my mother, but it didn’t do any good. The boys just accused me of being a tattletale. Not this time, though. This time I was going to be a good sport. If I was a good sport, maybe that would take away some of their joy.
When I came up to the surface, I smiled and said, “You guys are ten-year-olds.”
“For life,” Steven said smugly. His smuggy face made me want to splash him and soak him and his precious Hugo Boss sunglasses that he worked for three weeks to pay for.
Then I said, “I think you twisted my ankle, Conrad.” I pretended to have trouble swimming over to them.
He walked over to the edge of the pool. “I’m pretty sure you’ll live,” he said, smirking.
“At least help me out,” I demanded.
He squatted and gave me his hand, which I took.
“Thanks,” I said giddily. Then I gripped tight and pulled his arm as hard as I could. He stumbled, fell forward, and landed in the pool with a splash even bigger than mine. I think I laughed harder right then than I’ve laughed in my whole life. So did Jeremiah and Steven. I think maybe all of Cousins Beach heard us laughing.
Conrad’s head bobbed up quickly, and he swam over to me in about two strokes. I worried he might be mad, but he wasn’t, not completely. He was smiling but in a threatening kind of way. I dodged away from him. “Can’t catch me,” I said gleefully. “Too slow!”
Every time he came close, I swam away. “Marco,” I called out, giggling.
Jeremiah and Steven, who were headed back to the house, said, “Polo!”
Which made me laugh, which made me slow to swim away, and Conrad caught my foot. “Let go,” I gasped, still laughing.
Conrad shook his head. “I thought I was too slow,” he said, treading water closer to me. We were in the diving well. His white T-shirt was soaked through, and I could see the pinky gold of his skin.
There was this weird stillness between us all of a sudden. He still held on to my foot, and I was trying to stay afloat. For a second I wished Jeremiah and Steven were still there. I didn’t know why.
“Let go,” I said again.
He pulled on my foot, drawing me closer. Being this close to him was making me feel dizzy and nervous. I said it again, one last time, even though I didn’t mean it. “Conrad, let go of me.”
He did. And then he dunked me. It didn’t matter. I was already holding my breath.
chapter four
Susannah came down from her nap a little while after we put on dry clothes, apologizing for missing our big homecoming. She still looked sleepy and her hair was all feathery on one side like a kid’s. She and my mother hugged first, fierce and long. My mother looked so happy to see her that she was teary, and my mother was never teary.
Then it was my turn. Susannah swept me in for a hug, the close kind that’s long enough to make you wonder how long it’s going to last, who’ll pull away first.
“You look thin,” I told her, partly because it was true and partly because I knew she loved to hear it. She was always on a diet, always watching what she ate. To me, she was perfect.
“Thanks, honey,” Susannah said, finally letting me go, looking at me from arm’s length. She shook her head and said, “When did you go and grow up? When did you turn into this phenomenal woman?”
I smiled self-consciously, glad that the boys were upstairs and not around to hear this. “I look pretty much the same.”
“You’ve always been lovely, but oh honey, look at you.” She shook her head like she was in awe of me. “You’re so pretty. So pretty. You’re going to have an amazing, amazing summer. It’ll be a summer you’ll never forget.” Susannah always spoke in absolutes like that—and when she did, it sounded like a proclamation, like it would come true because she said so.
The thing is, Susannah was right. It was a summer I’d never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was. I was.
chapter five
Dinner the first night was always the same: a big pot of spicy bouillabaisse that Susannah cooked up while she waited for us to arrive. Lots of shrimp and crab legs and squid—she knew I loved squid. Even when I was little, I would pick out the squid and save it for last. Susannah put the pot in the middle of the table, along with a few crusty loaves of French bread from the bakery nearby. Each of us would get a bowl, and we’d help ourselves to the pot all throughout dinner, dipping the ladle back into the pot. Susannah and my mother always had red wine, and us kids had grape Fanta, but on that night there were wineglasses for everyone.
“I think we’re all old enough to partake now, don’t you, Laur?” Susannah said as we sat down.
“I don’t know about that,” my mother began, but then she stopped. “Oh, all right. Fine. I’m being provincial, isn’t that right, Beck?”
Susannah laughed and uncorked the bottle. “You? Never,” she said, pouring a little wine for each of us. “It’s a special night. It’s the first night of summer.”
Conrad drank his wine in about two gulps. He drank it like he was used to drinking it. I guess a lot can happen over the course of a year. He said, “It’s not the first night of summer, Mom.”
“Oh, yes it is. Summer doesn’t start until our friends get here,” Susannah said, reaching across the table and touching my hand, and Conrad’s, too.
He jerked away from her, almost by accident. Susannah didn’t seem to notice, but I did. I always noticed Conrad.
Jeremiah must have seen it too, because he changed the subject. “Belly, check out my latest scar,” he said, pulling up his shirt. “I scored three field goals that night.” Jeremiah played football. He was proud of all of his battle scars.
I leaned in next to him to get a good look. It was a long scar that was just beginning to fade, right across the bottom of his stomach. Clearly, he’d been working out. His stomach was flat and hard, and it hadn’t looked like that last summer even. He looked bigger than Conrad now. “Wow,” I said.
Conrad snorted. “Jere just wants to show off his two-pack,” he said, breaking off a piece of bread and dipping it into his bowl. “Why don’t you show all of us, and not just Belly?”
“Yeah, show us, Jere,” Steven said, grinning.
Jeremiah grinned right back. To Conrad he said, “You’re just jealous because you quit.” Conrad had quit football? That was news to me.
“Conrad, you quit, man?” Steven asked. I guessed it was news to him, too. Conrad was really good; Susannah used to mail us his newspaper clippings. He and Jeremiah had been on the team together these last two years, but it was Conrad who’d been the star.
Conrad shrugged indifferently. His hair was still wet from the pool, and so was mine. “It got boring,” he said.
“What he means is, he got boring,” Jeremiah said. Then he stood up and pulled off his shirt. “Pretty nice, huh?”
Susannah threw her head back and laughed, and my mother did too. “Sit down, Jeremiah,” she said, shaking the loaf of bread at him like a sword.
“What do you think, Belly?” he asked me. He looked like he was winking even though he wasn’t.
“Pretty nice,” I agreed, trying not to smile.
“Now it’s Belly’s turn to show off,” Conrad said mockingly.
“Belly doesn’t need to show off. We can all see how lovely she is just looking at her,” Susannah said, sipping her wine and smiling at me.
“Lovely? Yeah, right,” said Steven. “She’s a lovely pain in my ass.”
“Steven,” my mother warned.
“What? What’d I say?” he asked.
“Steven’s too much of a pig to understand the concept of lovely,” I said sweetly. I pushed the bread to him. “Oink, oink, Steven. Have some more bread.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he said, breaking off a crusty chunk.
“Belly, tell us about all the hot friends you’re gonna set me up with,” Jeremiah said.
“Didn’t we already try that once?” I said. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about Taylor Jewel already.”
Everyone busted up laughing then, even Conrad.
Jeremiah’s cheeks turned pink, but he was laughing too, and shaking his head. “You’re not a nice girl, Belly,” he said. “There’s plenty of cute girls at the country club, so don’t worry about me. Worry about Con. He’s the one missing out.”
The original plan was for both Jeremiah and Conrad to work at the country club as lifeguards. Conrad had done it the summer before. This summer Jeremiah was old enough to do it with him, but Conrad changed his mind at the last minute and decided to bus tables at the fancy seafood buffet instead.
We used to go there all the time. Kids twelve and younger could eat there for twenty dollars. There was a time when I was the only one twelve or younger. My mother always made sure to tell the waiter that I was younger than twelve. As, like, principle. Every time she did it, I felt like disappearing. I wished I was invisible. It wasn’t that the boys even made a big deal out of it, which they easily could have, but it was the feeling different, like an outsider, that I hated. I hated it being pointed out. I just wanted to be like them.
chapter six
AGE 10
Right off the bat, the boys were a unit. Conrad was the leader. His word was pretty much law. Steven was his second in command, and Jeremiah was the jester. That first night, Conrad decided that the boys were going to sleep on the beach in sleeping bags and make a fire. He was a Boy Scout; he knew all about that kind of stuff.
Jealously, I watched them plan. Especially when they packed the graham crackers and marshmallows. Don’t take the whole box, I wanted to tell them. I didn’t, though—it wasn’t my place. It wasn’t even my house.
“Steven, make sure you bring the flashlight,” Conrad directed. Steven nodded quickly. I had never seen him follow orders before. He looked up to Conrad, who was eight months older; it had always been that way. Everybody had somebody but me. I wished I was at home, making butterscotch sundaes with my dad and eating them on our living room floor.
“Jeremiah, don’t forget the cards,” Conrad added, rolling up a sleeping bag.
Jeremiah saluted him and danced a little jig, which made me giggle. “Sir, yes, sir.” He turned to me on the couch and said, “Conrad is bossy like our dad. Don’t feel like you have to listen to him or anything.”
Jeremiah talking to me made me feel brave enough to say, “Can I come too?”
Right away Steven said, “No. Guys only. Right, Con?”
Conrad hesitated. “Sorry, Belly,” he said, and he really did look sorry for a second. Two seconds, even. Then he went back to rolling his sleeping bag.
I turned away from them and faced the TV. “That’s okay. I don’t really care anyway.”
“Ooh, watch out, Belly’s gonna cry,” Steven said joyously. To Jeremiah and Conrad he said, “When she doesn’t get her way, she cries. Our dad always falls for it.”
“Shut up, Steven!” I yelled. I was worried I really might cry. The last thing I needed was to be a crybaby our first night. Then they’d never take me along for real.
“Belly’s gonna cry,” Steven said in a singsong voice. Then he and Jeremiah started to dance a jig together.
“Leave her alone,” Conrad said.
Steven stopped dancing. “What?” he said, confused.
“You guys are so immature,” Conrad said, shaking his head.
I watched them pick up their gear and get ready to leave. I was about to lose my chance to camp, to be a part of the gang. Quickly I said, “Steven, if you don’t let me go, I’ll tell Mom.”
Steven’s face twisted. “No, you won’t. Mom hates it when you tattletale.”
It was true, my mother hated it when I told on Steven for things like this. She’d say he needed his own time, that I could go the next time around, that it would be more fun at the house with her and Beck anyway. I sank into the couch, arms crossed. I’d lost my chance. Now I just looked like a tattletale, a baby.
On the way out Jeremiah turned around and danced a quick jig for me, and I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Over his shoulder Conrad said, “Good night, Belly.”
And that was it. I was in love.
chapter seven
I didn’t notice right away that their family had more money than ours. The beach house wasn’t some fancy kind of place. It was a real honest-to-God beach house, the kind that’s lived in and comfortable. It had faded old seersucker couches and a creaking La-Z-Boy us kids always fought over, and peeling white paint and hardwood floors that had been bleached by the sun.
But it was a big house, room enough for all of us and more. They’d built an addition years ago. On one end there was my mother’s room, Susannah and Mr. Fisher’s room, and an empty guest room. On the other end was my room, another guest room, and the room the boys shared, which I was jealous of. There used to be bunk beds and a twin in that room, and I hated that I had to sleep all alone in mine when I could hear them giggling and whispering all night through the wall. A couple of times the boys let me sleep in there too, but only when they had some especially gruesome story they wanted to tell. I was a good audience. I always screamed at all the right places.
Since we’ve gotten older, the boys have stopped sharing a room. Steven started staying over on the parents’ end, and Jeremiah and Conrad both had their rooms on my end. The boys and I have shared a bathroom since the beginning. Ours is on our end of the house, and then my mother has her own, and Susannah’s is connected to the master bedroom. There are two sinks—Jeremiah and Conrad shared one, and Steven and I shared the other.
When we were little, the boys never put the seat down, and they still didn’t. It was a constant reminder that I was different, that I wasn’t one of them. Little things have changed, though. It used to be that they left water all over the place, either from splash fights or from just being careless. Now that they shaved, they left their little chin hairs all over the sink. The counter was crowded with their different deodorants and shaving cream and cologne.
They had more cologne than I had perfume—one pink French bottle my dad bought me for Christmas when I was thirteen. It smelled like vanilla and burnt sugar and lemon. I think his grad student girlfriend picked it out. He wasn’t good at that sort of thing. Anyway, I didn’t leave my perfume in the bathroom mixed in with all their stuff. I kept it on the dresser in my room, and I never wore it anyway. I didn’t know why I even brought it with me.
chapter eight
After dinner I stayed downstairs on the couch and so did Conrad. He sat there across from me, strumming chords on his guitar with his head bent.
“So I heard you have a girlfriend,” I said. “I heard it’s pretty serious.”
“My brother has a big mouth.” About a month before we’d left for Cousins, Jeremiah had called Steven. They were on the phone for a while, and I hid outside Steven’s bedroom door listening. Steven didn’t say a whole lot on his end, but it seemed like a serious conversation. I burst into his room and asked him what they were talking about, and Steven accused me of being a nosy little spy, and then he finally told me that Conrad had a girlfriend.
“So what’s she like?” I didn’t look at him when I said this. I was afraid he’d be able to see how much I cared.
Conrad cleared his throat. “We broke up,” he said.
I almost gasped. My heart did a little ping. “Your mom is right, you are a heartbreaker.” I meant it to come out as a joke, but the words rang in my head and in the air like some kind of declaration.
He flinched. “She dumped me,” he said flatly.
I couldn’t imagine anyone breaking up with Conrad. I wondered what she was like. Suddenly she was this compelling, actual person in my mind. “What was her name?”
“What does it matter?” he said, his voice rough. Then, “Aubrey. Her name is Aubrey.”
“Why did she break up with you?” I couldn’t help myself. I was too curious. Who was this girl? I pictured someone with pale white blond hair and turquoise eyes, someone with perfect cuticles and oval-shaped nails. I’d always had to keep mine short for piano, and then after I quit, I still kept them short, because I was used to them that way.
Conrad put down the guitar and stared off into space moodily. “She said I changed.”
“And did you?”
“I don’t know. Everybody changes. You did.”
“How did I change?”
He shrugged and picked up his guitar again. “Like I said, everybody changes.”
Conrad started playing the guitar in middle school. I hated it when he played the guitar. He’d sit there, strumming, halfway paying attention, only halfway present. He’d hum to himself, and he was someplace else. We’d be watching TV, or playing cards, and he’d be strumming the guitar. Or he’d be in his room, practicing. For what, I didn’t know. All I knew was that it took time away from us.
“Listen to this,” he’d said once, stretching out his headphones so I had one and he had the other. Our heads touched. “Isn’t it amazing?”
“It” was Pearl Jam. Conrad was as happy and enthralled as if he had discovered them himself. I’d never heard of them, but at that moment, it was the best song I’d ever heard. I went out and bought Ten and listened to it on repeat. When I listened to track five, “Black,” it was like I was there, in that moment all over again.
After the summer was over, when I got back home, I went to the music store and bought the sheet music and learned to play it on the piano. I thought one day I could accompany Conrad and we could be, like, a band. Which was so stupid, the summer house didn’t even have a piano. Susannah tried to get one for the summer house, so I could practice, but my mother wouldn’t let her.
chapter nine
At night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sneak downstairs and go for a swim in the pool. I’d start doing laps, and I’d keep going until I felt tired. When I went to bed, my muscles felt nice and sore but also shivery and relaxed. I loved bundling myself up after a swim in one of Susannah’s cornflower blue bath sheets—I’d never even heard of bath sheets before Susannah. And then, tiptoeing back upstairs, falling asleep with my hair still wet. You sleep so well after you’ve been in the water. It’s like no other feeling.
Two summers ago Susannah found me down there, and some nights she’d swim with me. I’d be underwater, doing my laps, and I’d feel her dive in and start to swim on the other side of the pool. We wouldn’t talk; we’d just swim, but it was comforting to have her there. It was the only time that summer that I ever saw her without her wig.
Back then, because of the chemo, Susannah wore her wig all the time. No one saw her without it, not even my mother. Susannah had had the prettiest hair. Long, caramel-colored, soft as cotton candy. Her wig didn’t even compare, and it was real human hair and everything, the best money could buy. After the chemo, after her hair grew back, she kept it short, cut right below her chin. It was pretty, but it wasn’t the same. Looking at her now, you’d never know who she used to be, with her hair long like a teenager, like mine.
That first night of the summer, I couldn’t sleep. It always took me a night or two to get used to my bed again, even though I’d slept in it pretty much every summer of my life. I tossed and turned for a while, and then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I put on my bathing suit, my old swim team one that barely fit anymore, with the gold stripes and the racerback. It was my first night swim of the summer.
When I swam alone at night, everything felt so much clearer. Listening to myself breathe in and out, it made me feel calm and steady and strong. Like I could swim forever.
I swam back and forth a few times, and on the fourth lap, I started to flip turn, but I kicked something solid. I came up for air and saw it was Conrad’s leg. He was sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in. He’d been watching me that whole time. And he was smoking a cigarette.
I stayed underwater up to my chin—I was suddenly aware of how my bathing suit was too small for me now. There was no way I was getting out of the water with him still there.
“Since when did you start smoking?” I asked accusingly. “And what are you doing down here anyway?”
“Which do you want me to answer first?” He had that amused, condescending Conrad look on his face, the one that drove me crazy.
I swam over to the wall and rested my arms on the edge. “The second.”
“I couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk,” he said, shrugging. He was lying. He’d only come outside to smoke.
“How did you know I was out here?” I demanded.
“You always swim out here at night, Belly. Come on.” He took a drag of his cigarette.
He knew I swam at night? I’d thought it was my special secret, mine and Susannah’s. I wondered how long he had known. I wondered if everyone knew. I didn’t even know why it mattered, but it did. To me, it did. “Okay, fine. Then when did you start smoking?”
“I don’t know. Last year, maybe.” He was being vague on purpose. It was maddening.
“Well, you shouldn’t. You should quit right now. Are you addicted?”
He laughed. “No.”
“Then quit. If you put your mind to it, I know you can.” If he put his mind to it, I knew he could do anything.
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
“You should, Conrad. Smoking is so bad for you.”
“What will you give me if I do?” he asked teasingly. He held the cigarette in the air, above his beer can.
The air felt different all of a sudden. It felt charged, electric, like I had been zapped by a thunderbolt. I let go of the edge and started to tread water, away from him. It felt like forever before I spoke. “Nothing,” I said. “You should quit for yourself.”
“You’re right,” he said, and the moment was over. He stood up and ground his cigarette out on the top of the can. “Good night, Belly. Don’t stay out here too late. You never know what kind of monsters come out at night.”
Everything felt normal again. I splashed water at his legs as he walked away. “Screw you,” I said to his back. A long time ago Conrad and Jeremiah and Steven convinced me that there was a child killer on the loose, the kind who liked chubby little girls with brown hair and grayish-blue eyes.
“Wait! Are you quitting or not?” I yelled.
He didn’t answer me. He just laughed. I could tell by the way his shoulders shook as he closed the gate.
After he left, I fell back into the water and floated. I could feel my heart beating through my ears. It thudded quick-quick-quick like a metronome. Conrad was different. I’d sensed something even at dinner, before he’d told me about Aubrey. He had changed. And yet, the way he affected me was still the same. It felt just exactly the same. It felt like I was at the top of the Grizzly at Kings Dominion, right about to go down the first hill.
chapter ten
“Belly, have you called your dad yet?” my mother asked me.
“No.”
“I think you should call him and tell him how you’re doing.”
I rolled my eyes. “I doubt he’s sitting at home worrying about it.”
“Still.”
“Well, have you made Steven call him?” I countered.
“No, I haven’t,” she said, her tone level. “Your dad and Steven are about to spend two weeks together looking at colleges. You, on the other hand, won’t get to see him until the end of summer.”
Why did she have to be so reasonable? Everything was that way with her. My mother was the only person I knew who could have a reasonable divorce.
My mother got up and handed me the phone. “Call your father,” she said, leaving the room. She always left the room when I called my father, like she was giving me privacy. As if there were some secrets I needed to tell my father that I couldn’t tell him in front of her.
I didn’t call him. I put the phone back in its cradle. He should be the one calling me; not the other way around. He was the father; I was just the kid. And anyway, dads didn’t belong in the summer house. Not my father and not Mr. Fisher. Sure, they’d come to visit, but it wasn’t their place. They didn’t belong to it. Not the way we all did, the mothers and us kids.
chapter eleven
AGE 9
We were playing cards outside on the porch, and my mother and Susannah were drinking margaritas and playing their own card game. The sun was starting to go down, and soon the mothers would have to go inside and boil corn and hot dogs. But not yet. First they played cards.
“Laurel, why do you call my mom Beck when everyone else calls her Susannah?” Jeremiah wanted to know. He and my brother, Steven, were a team, and they were losing. Card games bored Jeremiah, and he was always looking for something more interesting to do, to talk about.
“Because her maiden name is Beck,” my mother explained, grinding out a cigarette. They only smoked when they were together, so it was a special occasion. My mother said smoking with Susannah made her feel young again. I said it would shorten her life span by years but she waved off my worries and called me a doomsdayer.
“What’s a maiden name?” Jeremiah asked. My brother tapped Jeremiah’s hand of cards to get him back into the game, but Jeremiah ignored him.
“It’s a lady’s name before she gets married, dipwad,” said Conrad.
“Don’t call him dipwad, Conrad,” Susannah said automatically, sorting through her hand.
“But why does she have to change her name at all?” Jeremiah wondered.
“She doesn’t. I didn’t. My name is Laurel Dunne, same as the day I was born. Nice, huh?” My mother liked to feel superior to Susannah for not changing her name. “After all, why should a woman have to change her name for a man? She shouldn’t.”
“Laurel, please shut up,” said Susannah, throwing a few cards down onto the table. “Gin.”
My mother sighed, and threw her cards down too. “I don’t want to play gin anymore. Let’s play something else. Let’s play go fish with these guys.”
“Sore loser,” Susannah said.
“Mom, we’re not playing go fish. We’re playing hearts, and you can’t play because you always try to cheat,” I said. Conrad was my partner, and I was pretty sure we were going to win. I had picked him on purpose. Conrad was good at winning. He was the fastest swimmer, the best boogie boarder, and he always, always won at cards.
Susannah clapped her hands together and laughed. “Laur, this girl is you all over again.”
My mother said, “No, Belly’s her father’s daughter,” and they exchanged this secret look that made me want to say, “What, what?” But I knew my mother would never say. She was a secret-keeper, always had been. And I guessed I did look like my father: I had his eyes that turned up at the corners, a little girl version of his nose, his chin that jutted out. All I had of my mother was her hands.
Then the moment was over and Susannah smiled at me and said, “You’re absolutely right, Belly. Your mother does cheat. She’s always cheated at hearts. Cheaters never prosper, children.”
Susannah was always calling us children, but the thing was, I didn’t even mind. Normally I would. But the way Susannah said it, it didn’t seem like a bad thing, not like we were small and babyish. Instead it sounded like we had our whole lives in front of us.
chapter twelve
Mr. Fisher would pop in throughout the summer, an occasional weekend and always the first week of August. He was a banker, and getting away for any real length of time was, according to him, simply impossible. And anyway, it was better without him there, when it was just us. When Mr. Fisher came to town, which wasn’t very often, I stood up a little straighter. Everyone did. Well, except Susannah and my mother, of course. The funny thing was, my mother had known Mr. Fisher for as long as Susannah had—the three of them had gone to college together, and their school was small.
Susannah always told me to call Mr. Fisher “Adam,” but I could never do it. It just didn’t sound right. Mr. Fisher was what sounded right, so that’s what I called him, and that’s what Steven called him too. I think some-thing about him inspired people to call him that, and not just kids, either. I think he preferred it that way.
He’d arrive at dinnertime on Friday night, and we’d wait for him. Susannah would fix his favorite drink and have it ready, ginger and Maker’s Mark. My mother teased her for waiting on him, but Susannah didn’t mind. My mother teased Mr. Fisher, too, in fact. He teased her right back. Maybe teasing isn’t the right word. It was more like bickering. They bickered a lot, but they smiled, too. It was funny: My mother and father had rarely argued, but they hadn’t smiled that much either.
I guess Mr. Fisher was good-looking, for a dad. He was better-looking than my father anyway, but he was also vainer than him. I don’t know that he was as good-looking as Susannah was beautiful, but that might’ve just been because I loved Susannah more than almost anyone, and who could ever measure up to a person like that? Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens—but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.
Mr. Fisher gave us kids a twenty anytime we went anywhere. Conrad was always in charge of it. “For ice cream,” he’d say. “Buy yourselves something sweet.” Something sweet. It was always something sweet. Conrad worshipped him. His dad was his hero. For a long time, anyway. Longer than most people. I think my dad stopped being my hero when I saw him with one of his PhD students after he and my mother separated. She wasn’t even pretty.
It would be easy to blame my dad for the whole thing—the divorce, the new apartment. But if I blamed anyone, it was my mother. Why did she have to be so calm, so placid? At least my father cried. At least he was in pain. My mother said nothing, revealed nothing. Our family broke up, and she just went on. It wasn’t right.
When we got home from the beach that summer, my dad had already moved out—his first-edition Hemingways, his chess set, his Billy Joel CDs, Claude. Claude was his cat, and he belonged to my dad in a way that he didn’t to anyone else. It was only right that he took Claude. Still, I was sad. In a way, Claude being gone was almost worse than my dad, because Claude was so permanent in the way he lived in our house, the way he inhabited every single space. It was like he owned the place.
My dad took me out for lunch to Applebee’s, and he said, apologetically, “I’m sorry I took Claude. Do you miss him?” He had Russian dressing on his beard, newly grown out, for most of the lunch. It was annoying. The beard was annoying; the lunch was annoying.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t look up from my French onion soup. “He’s yours anyway.”
So my father got Claude, and my mother got Steven and me. It worked out for everyone. We saw my father most weekends. We’d stay at his new apartment that smelled like mildew, no matter how much incense he lit.
I hated incense, and so did my mother. It made me sneeze. I think it made my father feel independent and exotic to light all the incense he wanted, in his new pad, as he called it. As soon as I walked into the apartment, I said accusingly, “Have you been lighting incense in here?” Had he forgotten about my allergy already?
Guiltily, my father admitted that yes, he had lit some incense, but he wouldn’t do it anymore. He still did, though. He did it when I wasn’t there, out the window, but I could still smell the stuff.
It was a two-bedroom apartment; he slept in the master bedroom, and I slept in the other one in a little twin bed with pink sheets. My brother slept on the pullout couch. Which, I was actually jealous of, because he got to stay up watching TV. All my room had was a bed and a white dresser set that I barely even used. Only one drawer had clothes in it. The rest were empty. There was a bookshelf too, with books my father had bought for me. My father was always buying me books. He kept hoping I’d turn out smart like him, someone who loved words, loved to read. I did like to read, but not the way he wanted me to. Not in the way of being, like, a scholar. I liked novels, not nonfiction. And I hated those scratchy pink sheets. If he had asked me, I would have told him yellow, not pink.
He did try, though. In his own way, he tried. He bought a secondhand piano and crammed it into the dining room, just for me. So I could still practice even when I stayed over there, he said. I hardly did, though—the piano was out of tune, and I never had the heart to tell him.
It’s part of why I longed for summer. It meant I didn’t have to stay at my father’s sad little apartment. It wasn’t that I didn’t like seeing him: I did. I missed him so much. But that apartment, it was depressing. I wished I could see him at our house. Our real house. I wished it could be like it used to be. And since my mother had us most of the summer, he took Steven and me on a trip when we got back. Usually it was to Florida to see our grandmother. We called her Granna. It was a depressing trip too—Granna spent the whole time trying to convince him to get back together with my mother, whom she adored. “Have you talked with Laurel lately?” she’d ask, even way long after the divorce.
I hated hearing her nag him about it; it wasn’t like it was in his control anyway. It was humiliating, because it was my mother who had split up with him. It was she who had precipitated the divorce, had pushed the whole thing, I knew that much for sure. My father would have been perfectly content carrying on, living in our blue two-story with Claude and all his books.
My dad once told me that Winston Churchill said that Russia was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. According to my dad, Churchill had been talking about my mother. This was before the divorce, and he said it half-bitterly, half-respectfully. Because even when he hated her, he admired her.
I think he would have stayed with her forever, trying to figure out the mystery. He was a puzzle solver, the kind of person who likes theorems, theories. X always had to equal something. It couldn’t just be X.
To me, my mother wasn’t that mysterious. She was my mother. Always reasonable, always sure of herself. To me, she was about as mysterious as a glass of water. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn’t want. And that was to be married to my father. I wasn’t sure if it was that she fell out of love or if it was that she just never was. In love, I mean.
When we were at Granna’s, my mother took off on one of her trips. She’d go to far-off places like Hungary or Alaska. She always went alone. She took pictures, but I never asked to look at them, and she never asked if I wanted to.